Our country (Japan) is an aging society, more specifically a super-aging society in which the percentage of the population aged 65 or older relative to the total population is over 21% due to improvement in living standards along with rapid economic growth after the war, improvement in public health, improvement in healthcare standards, and the like. Further, the population aged 65 and older relative to the total population of about 127.65 million is about 25.56 million in 2005, while the population aged 65 and older relative to the total population of about 124.11 million is estimated as large as about 34.56 million in 2020. In such an aging society, the persons in need of nursing or care due to illness, injury, advanced age, and the like are estimated as more than the persons in need of nursing in an ordinary society which is not an aging society. Additionally, our country is also a low-birthrate society in which the total fertility rate is 1.43 in 2013, for example. Thus, there is being caused a situation in which an aged family member (spouse, son or daughter, or sibling) cares for an elder person in need of nursing.
A person in need of nursing receives nursing or care in a hospital or a facility such as welfare center for the aged (such as short-stay facility for the aged, nursing home for the aged, and special nursing home for the aged under Japanese laws). In such facilities, there is caused a case in which a person in need of nursing is injured due to falling out of a bed or falling during walking, or slips out of a bed and walks round. Such a case needs to be handled as soon as possible. Further, such a situation can be more serious if it is left unsolved. Thus, nurses and careworkers check the safety and conditions of the persons in need of nursing by periodically going the rounds of them in the facilities.
However, the nurses and the like do not sufficiently increase for an increase in the persons in need of nursing, and the business field of nursing and cares is always lack of workers. Further, a less number of nurses and careworkers work in twilight shift or night shift than in day shift and an individual working load increases, and thus the working loads need to be alleviated. Further, a situation in which an aged nurse or the like cares for an aged person in need of nursing is often caused in the facilities. An elder person is generally weaker, and thus an elder nurse bears a heavier load on nursing and the like than a younger nurse and his/her motions and judgements are slower even if he/she is healthy.
There is required a technique for complementing the nursing works or care works in order to eliminate the shortage of workers and to alleviate the burdens on the nurses. Thus, in recent years, there have been studied and developed object monitoring techniques for monitoring objects to be monitored such as persons in need of nursing.
As one of the techniques, there is a nurse call system disclosed in Patent Literature 1, for example. The nurse call system disclosed in Patent Literature 1 is a nurse call system having a nurse call child machine installed by a bed and used by a patient for calling a nurse, and a nurse call parent machine installed at a nurse station and directed for answering the call by the nurse call child machine, the system having a camera for shooting the patient on the bed from above the bed and a state determination means for determining an occurrence of at least one of a state in which the patient sits up on the bed and a state in which the patient is away from the bed on the basis of a video shot by the camera, and outputting an attentional state occurring signal, in which the nurse call parent machine has a notification means for making a notification in response to the attentional state occurring signal.
On the other hand, persons living alone are similar to the persons in need of nursing in terms of safety check, and they are to be monitored.
When an object to be monitored is monitored by use of a plurality of devices, the monitoring result is transmitted to a plurality of terminal apparatuses, and while a terminal apparatus is checking a condition of the object, such as answering a nurse call, the fact is transmitted to the other terminal apparatuses. Thus, the user (monitoring person A) of the terminal apparatus handles the monitoring result, and thus the user (monitoring person B) of the other terminal apparatus tries to answer other monitoring result if any. The user (monitoring person A) of the terminal apparatus should perform an action (nursing, care, and help, for example) depending on the condition of the object based on the monitoring result, but when the user (monitoring person A) of the terminal apparatus only checks the condition of the object based on the monitoring result and does not perform the action depending on the condition of the object based on the monitoring result due to some cause, the user (monitoring person B) of the other terminal apparatus cannot recognize the situation and the action depending on the condition of the object based on the monitoring result can be delayed.
It is important to make accurate and rapid determinations and to handle in order to prevent accidents in the nursing work or care work, and there can arise a problem that a condition of an object can be severer when an accident which could have been prevented cannot be prevented due to delayed handling or when an action for trouble such as falling of the object is delayed.